Ah, Joey Lawrence — the gayest straight guy in Hollywood and a well-heeled clotheshorse who never met a body-hugging, neckline-plunging, ass-popping outfit concocted from equal parts International Male, Club Monaco, and Diesel that he didn’t want to pour himself into. There’s Metrosexual and then there’s Pseudo-Gay, and waxed, tweezed, bronzed, and buffed Little Joe is concrete evidence that a man can maintain hetero status while allowing his inner peacock to boldly strut its stuff.

Starlet.

I’ve heard tell that words like chime, melody, and lullaby are the most beautiful words in the English language. Lovely, to be sure, but I find starlet — the word and the act of being — to be a rare state of grace. When a star falls and strikes ground with one last, plaintive twinkle, the sound it makes? Starlet…

There was a time before there were Fame Whores and Celebutantes who have shows on E! and lay claim to fame just for being themselves when the ambitious race of Starlet People populated Hollywood. They were the studio contract players plucked out of beauty pageants and drama schools — hometown beauties made good who went off to Tinseltown and found the gates to the Emerald City thrown open for them. If stars are the established, volatile, and demanding talent, then starlets are the hungry, needy would-bes out to prove their worth and be chosen.

Yes, it’s starlets who are the magnetic, vacant Tabula Rasas on which we can project all our personal obsessions, but the male variety has always been in comparatively short supply. Every so often you’ll get a Christopher George, Joe Dallesandro, or Jon-Erik Hexum, but it’s harder for men to approximate the doe-eyed sex kittenry and goofy naïveté (“Won’t that be the day!”) that women exude as they’re chased around desks or pose in publicity stills. Male starletry has sadly fallen into the hands of celebrity broods and Reality TV douches as of late, and it sickens me.

But one man still embodies everything a starlet should be: the inestimable Marcus Patrick. (read the full article)

If this was a Lifetime movie, it would star Jennie Garth or Lisa Rinna as an improbably dollsome Middle American high school history teacher who inspires her students to succeed. Because she’s kindly and married to a carpenter or a landscaper, it never enters into her wittle mind that by undertaking private tutoring sessions with the semi-literate resident campus stud, she might also be inspiring him to wanna dick her hard Viking-style. That involves the receiver on their shoulders with ass pointed upward while the inserter faces away and hunches forward with their hands on their knees. The Magyars stole it from us — to be fair, we did rape the hell out of them, hence the term — and now it’s all over their gay porn features. (read the full article)

In theory, I can understand the motivation for women wanting to exploit men for kicks, but in practice, I find it tends to backfire. No matter how game the men are and how eager the ladies are, it still just seems gay. Here we have a perfect example. This is daytime trash geared for women. The host knows has a “Screw it — I’m getting paid.” sensibility about it all. The set resembles a dollhouse interior.

Nevertheless, gay.

Our bachelorette — a mouth-breathing dip with a wedge cut and Mom jeans — is definitely part of the problem. Her first grade reading skills put her out of the race from the get-go, and she seems unsure of where she is. It’s the guys who are supposed to seem stupid in this scenario, and Number 3 especially is out of her league in the brains and charisma department (the glasses are a nice against-type touch). It get’s worse, though. Conceptually, this is a nightmare. Having our blindfolded girl fist a glory hole while the host holds her straps like she’s a nasty bottom and himbos in International Male attire flex is a major stumbling block. The gay guys in the audience at 2:24 and 2:36 are clearly thinking “Dumbass! Go for the tits, not the traps!” (read the full article)

It’s just one of those things that can be called a “uniquely hetero” experience.

Now, I have positively zero history with or inclination toward professional athletics — specifically, as a viewer — and I always will. However, from what I can gather, there are big events held in stadiums and such — often televised — wherein actual adults lose their collective shit by watching men hit projectiles with sticks or place a ball through a net.

This is not a form of passive spectatorship by any means; fans will don team jerseys, disport garishly elaborate head gear, and paint their bodies in fetishistic tribal colors while boisterously alleging that a hated player on a rival team is performing a sex act on another man. There’s also likely to be no shortage of surly lamenting about how many foreigners have entered into the sport and/or how few white participants there are left, all capped off with grumbling about the cost of the whole event. Charred meat is consumed from grills situated around the trunk areas of cars. Essentially, it’s like a Teabagger rally, only with fewer fire arms, a broader age bracket, and less misspelled signs. (read the full article)

“It’s like I’m having the most beautiful dream and the most terrible nightmare all at once…”

It’s the gorgeous, mooningly Lynchian line delivered by a good girl in love in a bad way that’s always epitomized the eternal appeal of Twin Peaks for me, arguably the cult show that turned everything that came before it on its head while setting the new standard for everything that came after.

I can vividly remember watching the criminally brilliant pilot movie that chronicled an F.B.I. agent’s arrival in a small Pacific Northwest town to investigate the grisly slaying of the high school homecoming queen. The images I encountered therein remained with me all through school the next day and beyond: the best friend of the murdered Everygirl Laura Palmer looking to her empty desk and tearfully inferring that she would never return; a horrific crime scene in a derelict train car whose centerpiece was an altar-like mound of dirt venerating a half-heart necklace and the cryptic message Fire Walk With Me scrawled in blood; a brutalized girl wandering down from the mountain and into town, half-dead with her wrists bound; and a gloved hand retrieving the second half of the Laura’s necklace from under a rock under cover of night.

Peaks was my first formative experience in which TV shaped the entertainment I would later seek — a midnight movie magically broadcast right into my living room. What remains salient now as the series reaches its twenty-year anniversary is not just how it united an assemblage of character actors who you’d never expect to see all together in one night, but how the male cast in particular undercut expected soap stud clichés and offered up a unique palette of offbeat man candy you’re not likely to ever see again in primetime. (read the full article)

Kiss him, Red Singlet…please? All this needs to make it the GayVN awards-sweeper of the year is a box of Durex Maximums, a bottle of Wet Platinum, two stage names — may we suggest Brick Beeftower for Red and Butch Mountwell for Blue — and a great title. Mat Grapplers: The Big Take Down. Apt. And to the director: we doff our hats to your enviable skill with mise-en-scène. (read the full article)